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Just on the stroke of midnight in an underground barbershop in Times Square, Martin Krompier, Flegenheimer's right-hand man, found himself staring at a figure with a drawn gun. The gunman blew a hole in the ceiling to warn other occupants of the shop to scatter. Then he plugged Krompier four times.
In Brooklyn earlier the same day a hoodlum named Louis ("Pretty") Amberg, whose equally notorious brother Joseph had been murdered in a garage three weeks before, was hacked to death with a hatchet, left in a blazing sedan. Feeling as if the whole bloody business was some anachronistic throwback to the Prohibition Era, metropolitan police set about trying to make sense of the criminal carnage.
To the New York police, Flegenheimer himself had always been something of an enigma: a sloppy, unambitious burglar and package thief who became ruler of a great illegal beer distributing system in The Bronx, survived Repeal to go on into even more lucrative rackets. He was credited with running a waiters' union, a usurious system of small loans to the poor, several midtown night clubs in Manhattan. But the chief source of Flegenheimer's income was the policy game, the daily lottery which keeps most of Harlem's Negroes poor. Most players can bet only a few pennies at a time but total receipts run annually into the millions. On a table across which the Flegenheimer mob was shot in Newark, police found sheaves of financial figures, one adding machine slip totaling $827,000.
As to why Flegenheimer was ambushed, police offered several explanations. One was that his legal difficulties had brought so much unpleasant public attention to the local anderworld that it was deemed prudent to eliminate him. Another theory was that since Flegenheimer's exile, other gangs had "muscled in" on his interests. While police estimate that no less than 135 lives have been lost as a direct result of Flegenheimer's outlaw enterprises, he was known to favor the conference rather than the revolver as an instrument of settling jurisdictional disputes. From his Newark hideout he had sent an emissary to Manhattan several weeks ago.This emissary had never returned, and word had gone round that he was to be found in a barrel of cement on the bottom of the Hudson River. Krompier was supposed to have been on a second goodwill mission when he was shot in the Times Square barbershop.
New York City's Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine had a theory all his own. To him the murder of Amberg and the assault on the Flegenheimer gang were plainly the outcroppings of a race war in the underworld—Italians v. Jews. Accordingly, he sent his men out to find Charles Luciana, called "Lucky" because he is one of the few men to survive a "ride." "Lucky" Luciana is a squint-eyed Latin who is supposed to run the Unione Siciliana, a society which has progressively usurped the privilege of catering to New York's night life. In their march of progress, reasoned Commissioner Valentine, the "socalled Italian gangs" had felt it necessary to wipe out the "Jewish gangs" of Messrs. Amberg & Flegenheimer.